ABSTRACT
This chapter provides a different kind of evidence against Thomas Laqueur's claims for the history of the body. It focuses on the various alternative readings of Phaethousa, in order to show how different models of the female body engaged with a single Hippocratic story. Readings of Phaethousa alongside cases of sex change and of hermaphroditism can be found on both sides of Laqueur watershed, in the sixteenth as much as in the nineteenth century. Phaethousa combines clear signs of being a woman, in particular, the capacity to menstruate and to bear children, alongside markers of masculinity. One of the features most striking to a modern reader of the Epidemics is the naming of patients, which increases our sense of them as real people, accessible to us across the centuries. Hermaphrodites featured widely in classical Greek and Roman art and myth, sometimes as ideals, sometimes as monstrous. In the ancient world, Phaethousa did not appear in the company of hermaphrodites.
